Posts Tagged ‘wot i think’

Well here’s a remarkable thing – it’s been long enough since the sheer horror of the 90s FMV (Full Motion Video) adventure for the whole thing to finally feel nostalgic. But has someone finally made a game to go with it? Canadian team Zandel Media have tried with Missing: An Interactive Thriller’s first ‘episode’ [official site]. Here’s wot I think:

NEON STRUCT is a first-person stealth game from the makers of the excellent Eldritch. You play as a federal agent who falls foul of high-level conspiracy when an apparently routine mission goes wrong. It’s out now.

It might have lacked much of what made later stages of Ion Storm’s game so beloved, but first level Liberty Island was also the freeform Deus Ex promise writ largest: a wide-open playground for action and most especially evasion. While what followed introduced more ways to kill, people to talk to, secrets to find and decisions to agonise over, it downscaled the sandbox, live by your wits promise. What if Deus Ex had been like Liberty Island throughout?

I like Sunset [official site] for its sense of place, for its lighting, for its drip feed of story, for the emphasis on subtle change and human scale in an event games tend to deal with via guns and power fantasies and super tech. But when it comes to the relationship building which lies at the centre of the game Sunset can stumble. Here’s Wot I Think.

Most of all, I’m not sure wot I think of Epanalepsis. I’ve played it through three times now. I still have very little idea what it’s about, both in terms of its cloaked narrative, and its reason for being. And yet I find myself looking at it somewhat fondly.

I’d almost forgotten the feeling. I’d begun to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I was deluded in my belief that adventure games could create coherent pathways, difficult yet fun puzzles, and characters whose motivations extended beyond the need to reach the next screen. What a relief it is, then, to play sci-fi dystopia Technobabylon. Here’s wot I think.

If Hotline Miami had come into being during a late night session in an British pub, it would probably have emerged into the light looking quite a lot like Not a Hero [official site]. Although its action is side-on rather than topdown, the content is similar – surrealist sprees of violence involving an odd crew of protagonists and countless stereotypical gangland denizens. It’s from the makers of indie skateboarding smash hit OlliOlli and here’s wot I think.

I’d been wanting to check out Doublebear’s Dead State – which I’m going to loosely label ‘The Walking Dead does X-COM’ – for a while, but Wot I Thinkery fell to someone else upon its initial release. The free ‘Reanimated’ update is a fancy name for a mega-patch designed to address assorted gripes about the doomy turn-based strategy/RPG zombie survival game, and also my opportunity to finally visit the blighted town of Splendid, Texas.

Children are fickle creatures, and today’s craze is tomorrow’s landfill. One of my earliest memories is of mum trying to convince me that He-Man was much cooler than the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, despite there only being one of him, that he could easily take them in a fight. I stubbornly refused to accept this reasoning, my painstakingly-accumulated He-Man collection was on the scrapheap, and the poor parents had to start buying TMNT toys instead.

Now that the children of the 80s and 90s are adults, something funny but predictable has happened. Everything old is new again, reborn or rebooted to try and bring our inner child back – and so we come to Chroma Squad [official site], the greatest Power Rangers game there never was.

I’m amazed it took them two decades, to be honest, but there is now an official soft toy based on DOOM’s floaty, cyclopic head o’death the Cacodemon. What was once meant to be a chilling avatar of demonic terror is now furry, squeezable and cute as big red button. Because I am an entirely-self interested father, I bought one for my daughter Connie’s second birthday instead of getting her a sparkly Frozen dress, a Peppa Pig playset, a cordless hammer drill or whatever it is young girls are into these days. This means a) I can get her to review it for me here and b) I can claim it as a tax expense. I totally win at toddlers’ birthdays.Read the rest of this entry »

Kerbal Space Program [official site] is a game about exploration, vehicular design and physics. It involves triumph and tragedy, careful meticulous planning and improvised catastrophe. We asked Brendan to suit up and go forth, in the name of science.

Invisible, Inc. [official site] is a game of “tactical espionage” from the creators of Mark of the Ninja, immediately understandable as XCOM meets Mission Impossible. You control a tiny team of sleuths working to rob the procedurally-generated vaults, server farms and detention centres of four high-tech corporations. In just 72 hours you’ll be taking on a fittingly impossible mission, and failure is not an option. Here’s wot I think.